What do you mean?
While there are many problems with the USA, its legal protections of e.g. freedom of expression are vastly superior to those found in European nations.
You can still privately publish any photo you like, within the bounds of the law.
There is lots of middle ground. "Legally you can, but morally, should you?"
Time series get interesting.
If it comes to actual law and courts, it's definitely context dependent. Intent matters a lot. Surf cam is more OK than "revenge cam" of ex's house. Yes that means humans ascribe morality to certain arrangements of bits (and how the bits are evaluated is affected by who they were created by, and why). No, publishing and freedom of speech are not absolute but depend on purpose and intent.
To put it another way, technically child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?
But presumably it's not the capturing of the photons that is criminal in the case of child pornography. Even if you used a fake camera, it's still illegal, right?
Well, then, I suppose what I'm saying is: in an information-age society, it's the child exploitation/molestation that's properly a crime; capturing the same as a piece of media is no modifier.
What I am saying is, if society wants to, it can totally declare that some pictures / videos are ok and some are not. This already happens all the time.
Rights are weighted against each other all the time, why should e.g. freedom of press be any different in this case?
Re your elites argument, right now "normal people" are generally awarded more protections than important figures, although the latter have more resources available to try nevertheless. They'll still have those resources, and normal people still won't have them, if you remove protections.
Or, we can have a compromise, since the world isn't black and white, and we needn't restrict ourselves to a binary choice.
That's how the European rights work, on life, expression (speech), privacy and so on.